Overview

Grownupedness is a personal memoir, rich with the insight of Clarissa P. Greens decades-long career as a university professor and family therapist working with aging parents and their mid-life children. In finding that the search for authenticity and the desire to appear and act grown up was shared among those families that she counselled, Clarissa brings to life her stories, insights and personal family experiencesmaking her deep understanding of aging and family life available to all families or individuals struggling with age and family relationships. Using her own similar family struggles and sharing the deeply personal process of her familys history and future interlocking through time, Clarissa explores when and how grownupedness emerges and evolves, what threatens or cobbles it, and what it looks and sounds like in action over time.

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9781989467244

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Reviews

Green left childhood behind at age ten, a year of pandemonium a reminder that terrible things do happen to good people. She shares, with honesty and humour, a chronicle of crisis and change, a brilliant legacy of wisdom to anyone who has been bewildered by their family. -- Alex Fancy, professor emeritus, Mount Allison University, 3M National Teaching Fellow In Grownupedness, Clarissa P. Green blends her professional and personal experience to help the reader navigate painful choices with loving clarity. -- Leslie Hill, author of Dressed for Dancing: My Sojourn in the Findhorn Foundation These probing and reflective essays show us that there's no free pass -- aging is rarely easy, and renegotiating the terms of our relationships with loved ones as we all grow older requires us to reckon with old demons, to examine outgrown assumptions, to acknowledge and respect our losses. Honest, moving, yet hopeful. -- Susan Olding, Aathor of Pathologies: A Life in Essays Part memoir, part analysis of the human condition, Green's brilliant book holds you in its warm embrace and says, It takes courage to grow up. From the first chapter when you begin to understand the author's lifelong commitment to understanding how crisis restructures families and personalities, until you arrive at the final chapter, you'll laugh, weep unexpectedly and be caught off guard by moments of insight. -- Ethel Whitty, author of The Light a Body Radiates With unflinching curiosity for the complexities of the human journey, she shares naked emotions and truths she discovers along the way. Poignant, visceral, humorous, insightful and inspiring -- a must read for anyone living a life. -- Jane Mortifee, singer and author of Out of the Fire Her personal stories will move you. Her professional wisdom will give you hope that the inevitable tensions brought about by aging can also provide rich experiences worth the effort. -- Sally Halliday, MA, RCC, CCC, registered clinical counsellor specializing in mid-life changes and former CBC journalist In her astounding Grownupedness, Green banishes cliches and psychobabble. She tells disquieting life stories. Green's book confronts us with lurid details about getting old and about living with people getting old. We are all headed that way. Green dares us to pay attention. -- Guy Allen, professor, director of the Professional Writing and Communication Program, University of Toronto

Author Information

Clarissa P. Green has spent her life exploring and teaching how family relationships are changed by aging, illness and death. In her decades-long career as a therapist, Green has helped families reconfigure their relationships and conceptions of self in the face of trauma and aging. An associate professor emerita at the University of British Columbia, Green's continuing-studies programs, The Widowed Journey and The Mid-Life Daughters' Workshop, ran for more than a decade. Green was a founder of what is now the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, and she has received numerous teaching awards, including the Killam Teaching Prize from UBC and the 3M National Teaching Award. Green's belief that personal experience is necessary for learning and growth developed naturally alongside a lifelong passion for storytelling. Green completed the Simon Fraser University Writer's Studio program in 2007, and her short fiction piece The Coin won first prize at the Vancouver International Writer's Festival in 2009. Green's numerous works have been published in anthologies, Geist magazine, and The Fieldstone Review.

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